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You are here: Home / Archives for Jesus

Trinity Sunday 2017: The Tao of Jesus

June 11, 2017 by Cam Miller

TEXTS FOR PREACHING

Genesis 1:1-2:3, as told by Marc Gellman in “Does God have a Big Toe?”

“Partners”                                                                                          

 Before there was anything, there was God, a few angels, and a huge swirling glob of rocks and water with no place to go. The angels asked God,

“Why don’t you clean up this mess?” 

So God collected rocks from the huge swirling glob and put them together in clumps and said, “Some of these clumps of rocks will be planets, and some will be stars, and some of these rocks will be…just rocks.”

Then God collected water from the huge swirling glob and put it together in pools of water and said, “Some of these pools of water will be oceans, and some will become clouds, and some of this water will be…just water.”

Then the angels said, “Well God, it’s neater now, but is it finished?” And God answered…“NOPE!” 

On some of the rocks God placed growing things, and creeping things, and things that only God knows what they are, and when God had done all this, the angels asked God, “Is the world finished now?” And God answered: “NOPE!” 

God made a man and a woman from some of the water and dust and said to them, “I am tired now. Please finish up the world for me…really it’s almost done.” But the man and woman said, “We can’t finish the world alone! You have the plans and we are too little.” 

“You are big enough,” God answered them. “But I agree to this. If you keep trying to finish the world, I will be your partner.”

The man and the woman asked, “What’s a partner?” and God answered, “A partner is someone you work with on a big thing that neither of you can do alone. If you have a partner, it means that you can never give up, because your partner is depending on you. On the days you think I am not doing enough and on the days I think you are not doing enough, even on those days we are still partners and we must not stop trying to finish the world. That’s the deal.” And they all agreed to that deal. 

Then the angels asked God,

“Is the world finished yet?” and God answered, “I don’t know. Go ask my partners.” 

Matthew 28:16-20

The eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

SERMON

“What’s a partner?”
“A partner,” God answered, “is someone you work with
on a big thing that neither of you can do alone.
If you have a partner,
it means you can never give up,
because your partner is depending on you.”

Or, to put it in Gospel-language
instead of Marc Gellman’s Midrash:
“Go, therefore,
and bring all people to the water,
baptizing them
and teaching them
to live life as I would have.
And remember:
I am with you always,
your partner,
to the end of the age.”

Let’s try to hear these two voices,
God’s and Jesus’,
with the tonal quality and hushed ambiance
with which they are pregnant.

So retrieve, if you can, the echo
of an old sensation you have known,
when you felt so much love
that you could not even speak it.
Or a moment you felt so much joy
words not only failed you,
you knew that to speak any words
would diminish the feeling.

I hope there is a moment or two
within reach of your memory,
when you felt so full of God or life or love or joy
you just wanted to gush,
but could only stutter or flap your lips like a fish.
Now that kind of intensely infused ebullience
is not an every day occurrence,
but once in a while
we may get a full-to-the-brim amazement
for the graciousness of God
or the magnificence of life.

That is how I imagine Jesus felt
saying good-bye to his friends in Matthew.

Standing on the edge of knowing,
seeing but not quite touching
the God-of-all-creation,
he scrambled for last words.
They were not dying words,
but last words.
He had to say good-bye
when he knew it was not forever
even though it was final.
And it is no coincidence
that Jesus’ last words in Matthew,
the most Jewish of Gospels,
also mirror God’s first words –
at least the first words we put into his mouth in Genesis:
“And God looked around
at the stars
and the planets in their courses,
at the earth and oceans,
at microbes, insects, and even a bald ostrich trying to fly,
and God whispered in reverently hushed amazement:
“This is good.
This is really good.”

For God, who is apparently a god of few words,
such a short, terse proclamation
is downright ebullient.

As we might imagine it,
“This is really good,”
was so full of joy and love and laughter
that God, wanting to share the moment,
turned to the nearest animal
and impetuously shouted,
“Hey, be my partner in all of this, will you?”

And that was us.
And here we are, still working at it,
because when you’re a partner
you can never give up.

Now the only way we could ever imagine
that kind of moment with God,
in that particular way,
is because we have felt that way ourselves.

Maybe we have not felt that way
since Christmas Eve when we were five years old
and couldn’t sleep.

And maybe we have not felt that way
since we stood with our arms around our greatest love,
gazing into his or her eyes
with the taste of their lips on ours.

And maybe we have not felt that way
since the painful veil of childbirth had burst
and there upon our skin laid the freshest flesh on earth
to whom we could only coo.

And maybe we have not felt that way
since we stood silent at the edge of Letchworth canyon
or Seneca Lake at sunset,
or the mighty Niagara pouring itself through
the ancient narrowing funnel.
But sometime,
whenever it was,
we have known that sensation –
the wordless,
tearful,
unutterable ebullience
upon which creation was formed.

Truly, upon which creation was made.

Like a spoon balancing on the tip of a finger,
the creation balances upon God’s ebullience
and it courses through us,
filtered as it is
by the hard edge of pain we have known.
But nonetheless it there within us,
there to be called upon
like some ancient, deep oasis in the sand.

We need moments
and rituals and people
in our lives,
that remind us of our partnership
so that we don’t forget how to draw
upon that river of ebullience
deep down within our memory.

We can and do live long stretches of life
without that sensation of wordless joy,
and so we need special events,
and special people,
and special rituals,
to remind us it is there
and where to find it.

It being “Trinity Sunday”
there might be some expectation
that I would talk about the doctrine of the Trinity,
and proclaim or celebrate it.
But then again,
talking about the creator,
and the partner,
and their ebullience
may be all I have to say on the subject.

I think when we come to that imagination
about the beginning,
when God uttered in hushed amazement,
“This is really good”;
and when we try to hear
the reverential tone in Jesus’ voice
when he says good-bye;
that we need to remember something very basic.

Christianity is not a theology;
in fact, there a lots of theologies around.
Christianity is not a religion;
in fact, there are goo-gobs of religion around.
Christianity is not a moral system;
in fact, we have lots of moral systems.

Instead, Christianity is a way of life.
It is what that first generation of Jesus-followers
called “the way,”
and what we might call,
in our time of greater cultural fluidity,
The Tao of Jesus.

Our baptism,
if we will remember and contemplate
that baptismal covenant we often recite,
amounts to a partnership document.

“Will you travel the Tao of Jesus,”
we could just as well ask,
and our response is,
“We will with God’s help.”

And just as there are many ways of interpreting
and following the Tao of Buddha,
and the Tao of Mohammad,
and the Tao of Krishna,
there are many known ways to interpret
and to follow the Tao of Jesus.

And yet, every authentic Tao of Jesus
is fundamentally a partnership with God.
And every Tao of Jesus will take us,
if we are faithful and courageous with it,
to a moment or moments
of wordless ebullience.

No matter what it is
that brings us here to this place today –
whether we are seeking
or weary
or poor
or lonely
or simply following a routine –
what awaits us is the reminder of our partnership,
and an invitation to rejoin the path we lost
in the tangle that is our life,
and the hope that the partnership
and the path
will lead us to at least one more
incredible moment of ebullience.

That’s all I got, but really, it is a lot.

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Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: "the way", Jesus, Tao

7 Easter A: Catching Fire!

May 28, 2017 by Cam Miller

Texts for Preaching

Acts 1:6-14 

When they were together for the last time they asked, “Master, are you going to restore the kingdom of Israel now? Is this the time?”

He told them, “You don’t get to know the time. Timing is God’s business. What you’ll get is the Holy Spirit. And when theHoly Spirit comes on you, you will be able to be my witnesses in Jerusalem, all overJudea and Samaria, even to the ends of the world.”

These were his last words. As they watched, he was taken up and disappeared in a cloud. They stood there, staring into the empty sky. Suddenly two men appeared – in white robes! They said, “You Galileans! – why do you just stand here looking up at an empty sky? This very Jesus who was taken up from among you to heaven will come as certainly – and mysteriously – as he left.”

So they left the mountain called Olives and returned to Jerusalem. It was a little over half a mile. They went to the upper room they had been using as a meeting place: Peter, John, James, Andrew, Philip, Thomas, Bartholomew, Matthew, James, son of Alphaeus, Simon the Zealot, Judas, son of James.

They agreed they were in this for good, completely together in prayer, the women included. Also Jesus’ mother, Mary, and his brothers. 

Liturgical Reading
Excerpt from “Holy the Firm” by Annie Dillard

One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burnt dry, and held. I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up when a shadow crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all. A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspan, flapped into the fire, dropped her abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, frazzled and fried in a second. Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine. At once the light contracted again and the moth’s wings vanished in affine, foul smoke. At the same time her six legs clawed, curled, blackened, and ceased, disappearing utterly. And her head jerked in spasms, making a splattering noise; her antennae crisped and burned away and her heaving mouth parts crackled like pistol fire. When it was all over, her head was, so far a I could determine, gone, gone the long way of her wings and legs. Had she been new, or old? Had she mated and laid her eggs, had she done her work? All that was left was the glowing horn shell of her abdomen and thorax – a fraying, partially collapsed gold tube jammed upright in the candle’s round pool.

And then this moth-essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax rose in the moth’s body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height, side by side. The moth’s head was fire. She burned for two hours, until I blew her out.

She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning – only glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brains in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet.

Good morning.

I want to begin with something
that may be obvious to some
and startling to others,
but needs to be said now and again.

On the Church calendar
this is not Memorial Day weekend.
Today, this year anyway,
it is the last Sunday of Easter season,
and on that Sunday we always hear a piece
of Jesus’ farewell in the Gospel of John.

The bigger point is,
in the Church, on Sunday,
we do not celebrate national holidays.

Whether it is Columbus Day
or Veterans Day,
Memorial Day
or Mother’s Day,

Independence Day
or Presidents Day,
on Sundays we do not mix
the celebration of Holy Eucharist
with any nationalistic holiday or cause.

That is because Christianity
and the Gospel of Jesus Christ,
has no nation.
Christianity has no national loyalty.
Christianity,
and our vows as baptized Christians,
does not recognize nationalism, internationalism,
partisanship, or any other secular ideology that exists.

In fact, every time in history a church or religion
has aligned itself with a national ideology
it created ugliness and spawned bitter violence.

Now all of us live with divided loyalties
and divided minds, and multiple commitments.
That is normal, expected, and understood.
But in this space, in this sanctuary,
there is no flag of nation
and no pledge of allegiance to party or constitution.

Therefore, while all of us
may well have loved ones on our minds
and in our prayers today,
and especially those who may have died
in the service of their country –
whether on a battlefield,
or in the line of duty,
or as a servant and advocate for justice –
we are celebrating Eucharist today.

So I hope no one is surprised
or disappointed
if they arrive on Mother’s Day
or Memorial Day
or 4th of July weekend,
and the theme of the Eucharist on such days
does not even mention the holiday.
Instead, our focus will always be
on the theme of that liturgical season,
or the sacred moment itself,
or on the open table we offer,
or the spiritual practice of our baptism.
It does not mean we do not care about
other cultural and civic events,
but simply that we let those be celebrated
elsewhere and on other grounds,
while on this holy ground
we gather for this sacred meal.

(Even that most special of all days
will not be observed here in a few weeks:
Father’s Day).

Now for the real sermon.

The editors of the Gospels had a problem.
It is one routinely faced in Hollywood and on television.
What were those Gospel editors supposed to do
for the last episode
after the amazing surprise ending
created by the resurrection?
How were they going to have Jesus exit
a second time?

It’s not unlike the dilemma faced
by television serials,
in which the season ends
with a main character getting killed.
What we often discover
at the beginning of the Fall Season
is that the character wasn’t actually killed as we thought,
and we are shown how he or she was saved.

Jesus is executed on the cross,
dies, and is buried.
The level of physical abuse
from the flogging alone was enough to kill him,
let alone the grueling physical torture on the cross.
His bloody body was laid in the tomb
and a big rock rolled over the doorway.
The tomb was sealed.

It was over.
It was finished.
But wait!
Unexpectedly, the stone is mysteriously dislodged
and the tomb is shown empty.

Jesus’ three-year ministry
is act one;
the betrayal, arrest, trial, and execution
act two;
the resurrection is act three.

But the author of the Book of Acts,
who is also the author of Luke’s gospel,
has a dilemma.
The Book of Acts
is the story of the earliest followers of Jesus,
and it has to figure out an exit for Jesus
before the next chapter can be written.
So the author of Luke-Acts creates an epilogue,
and has Jesus exit
the way other great prophets of Israel exited:
into the clouds.
Elijah did it
and so did Moses.

It is such a natural way
for a holy man or woman to exit
that Buddhism is full of ascending mystics too.
And in Islam, Jesus disappears like that as well.
In fact, the Quran tells us
Jesus did not really die on the cross.
It suggests that in fact,
he may have passed death altogether
when he was lifted up and taken directly to God.
That is because it is inconceivable in the Quran,
that a prophet chosen by God for such purpose
would ever be allowed to be tortured and executed
at the hands of enemies.
So of course he was taken up.

Figuring out a fitting exit for such godly humans
is a difficult challenge
because, let’s face it,
death is messy.
A torturous death is the messiest,
not to mention the most shocking and scandalous.

It strikes me that Jesus’ death is like that moth
in Annie Dillard’s pericope of illumination.
Jesus’ messy, torturous
and grotesque death
is a wick of holiness…for us.
His death continues to illuminates the darkness
long after,
as does a star that burned out
a hundred million years ago
yet flicker in the night sky tonight.

To appropriate Annie Dillard’s
exquisite description and apply it to Jesus:
The spectacular skeleton on the cross
acts as a wick.
Jesus keeps burning.
The holiness that fuels this fire
rises in the dead Messiah’s body
from his pierced and soaking abdomen
to his thorax
to the jagged holes in his hands,
and he widens into a flame –
a saffron-yellow flame
that opens a bud of light in our darkness
as if a bloom into the light of spring.

I love that image
because it reminds us of a hard
but spectacular truth
residing at the core of our spiritual wisdom.
It is a wisdom that may be so obvious,
so brilliantly radiant,
that we live in its light
but forget about its presence.

We are reminded of it
in our baptismal promises
every time we recite them,
and Jesus burning luminously upon the cross
reminds us of it as well.
In fact, anyone who has ever loved
has been reminded of it
with each painful sacrifice exacted by loving.

The wick of holiness
siphoning God into our hearts
like an artisan well draws water to Earth’s surface, is this:
a willingness to disappear
so that someone else may live
.

Think on that for a moment.
…a willingness to disappear
so that someone else may live
.

The first-responder that enters a burning building
to save the life of an utter stranger –
what is that?

The human rights advocate
who lives precariously on the margin
of deprivation and violence,
and who may even get murdered while trying to
non-violently defend those even more vulnerable –
what is that?

The health professional
that enters the quarantined zone to care for dying victims
or to help figure out what is killing them –
what is that?

Enlisting to serve in combat, knowingly going to war
to defend one’s country and preserve a way of life,
even for people never known. What is that?
Risking one’s life
in a particular moment
in order that a stranger may live,
is to illuminate the darkness
with an idea about life
that is greater than oneself.

To disappear
that someone else may have life,
is a powerful idea
greater than any single self.

It is an idea as well as an act
that defies the logic of survival
and self-preservation.

To willingly, perhaps even unnecessarily,
risk one’s life on behalf of others
or even on behalf of an idea, is stunning.
More than stunning.
it is confounding and astounding.

And yet, there it is
at the very heart of our spiritual wisdom.
Right there at the bull’s-eye
is an invitation to give it all up.

It is not a demand –
even God could not make such a demand.
It is an invitation.

It is an invitation to live life on behalf of others,
and it is the encouragement
to live life in such as way
as to create a more abundant life for all people.

At the heart of what we say and do
as Christians –
as people baptized into a particular
spiritual practice –
is the invitation to become a wick,
a conduit for holiness
between God and others.

It is an invitation to be willing
to give it all up if need be –
the ‘it’ being everything from life choices to life itself.

To get specific,
the baptismal covenant we have been saying
throughout Easter season,
is an insistent contradiction
of what most of us were raised to think and believe.
We were taught to be individuals and individualistic;
encouraged to be consumers in fact,
with insatiable appetites.
We were taught to care more about our own people,
and our own neighbors,
and our own nation,
and our economy
more than any other people or nations or economies
anywhere else, as if we are an island
that could survive without an ocean.

We have been taught to look out for #1
and that those with the most toys at the end win.
We have been nurtured to believe that success
and achievement is measured in dollars,
and power, and fame.

But in baptism,
yours and mine,
we are invited to reject those ideas as rotten
even at the cost of our own lives if necessary.

We are invited to
use our lives –
to use them up if need be –
in defeat of those rotten ideas.

We are invited to
use our lives –
to use them up if need be –
to supplant those rotten ideas
with new ideas that are not self-centered at the core.

We are invited to use up our own life,
if need be,
to illuminate the darkness
created by rotten ideas
as a moth burning brightly against the night.

Anyone who has even briefly strolled through Christianity
as it is articulated in the gospels,
knows this invitation.
If Jesus is about anything
it is about this invitation to use our lives
to illuminate the darkness.

And yet we take it for granted.
Jesus burning at the center,
wicking the love of God up his own mutilated body,
is so right there at the center of it all
we can easily forget,
and ignore, and deny it.
But when we juxtapose the baptismal invitation
to use our lives to illuminate the darkness,
up against our economic and cultural
measurements and standards for goodness,
it is startling –
crazy even.

The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
once challenged us, ironically as it turned out,
that the question is not
what are we willing to die for,
but what are we willing to live for
?
Our baptism,
yours and mine,
challenges us with the same question:
“What are we willing to live for?”
What, in fact, are we living for?

In economics,
we would measure what we are living for
by what it costs us,
and its value would be determined
by the cost-benefit ratio.
That is not the baptismal standard,
and in fact,
that kind of economic standard
actually diminishes our lives.

What are we living for?
Once we know,
we can go out and spend our lives on it.
And it doesn’t matter how much life we have lived already, whether we are twenty or ninety,
the challenge is still the same.

In our baptism
we have been called to reject
rotten ideas about what our life is for
and instead, to use our life
on behalf of ideas bigger than us,
and for people beyond us.

It is a one-day at a time kind of thing,
and sometimes,
a one-moment-at-a-time kind of act.
Our spiritual practice,
described in our baptismal covenant,
invites us to become a wick of God’s love
that we may illuminate the darkness with our very own lives.

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6 Epiphany 2017: We don’t have to be “good”

February 12, 2017 by Cam Miller

Anser_caerulescens_CT8
Link to a Liturgical Poem for 6 Epiphany: http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/geese/geese.html

Link to Lectionary texts for 6 Epiphany: http://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=18

The reading from Matthew this morning
begs for a foil,
someone or something
to stand in the middle of the road
and risk being run over
by the steamroller coming through.

Mary Oliver volunteered.

We do not have to be good.

Let me say it again,
even though I know it contradicts
everything we think we know from Scripture,
and especially from what we heard today:
We do not have to be good.

So let us dig a little deeper
than the categorical thinking we meet
on the surface of Matthew.
As hard as Matthew works to disguise it,
Jesus is actually quite compassionate and progressive
on divorce.

First of all, I want to just put it out there
in no uncertain terms:
the position of the Roman Catholic Church on divorce
is not rooted in Jesus.
Nor, by the way, was or is
the common understanding of divorce
in The Episcopal Church.

Again, let’s dig deeper.
Jesus’ teaching on divorce
is treated slightly differently
in the three gospels in which it appears:
Mark, Matthew and Luke.
So I am going to talk specifically
about what Jesus says according to Mark,
because Mark was the first Gospel
and both Matthew and Luke were poured from its mold.

As is true with anything we read or encounter
from ancient times – or more recent ones, for that matter –
to fully understand Jesus’ teaching on divorce
we have to know what is in the background.

So first of all,
Jesus is not merely being questioned
about his opinion on divorce;
the question has a very specific context.
The audience wants to know,
which of the great rabbis Jesus agrees with:
Rabbi Hillel or Rabbi Shammai?

In fact, a great many of the
parables and proverbial sayings of Jesus
are either from one of these two great rabbis
or a variation on what one or both of them taught.
Jesus did not just appear out of the clear blue sky,
like Superman from Krypton,
but was raised and influenced
by his time and place just as we are.

Jesus was born
and lived in the shadow
of these two great teachers and scholars,
Hillel and Shammai.
As if a grand theological “Point-Counter-Point,”
Hillel was what we might call the liberal
and Shammai the conservative –
although those modern categories
do not really work for the ancient text.

In the background of almost every question
a lawyer, Pharisee, or scribe poses to Jesus,
stand the hulking figures of Hillel and Shammai.
“Whose side are you on?” they ask Jesus.

Every bit as much
as they want to know Jesus’ opinion about divorce,
Jesus is actually being asked,
which authority he follows.
Not surprisingly, rather than taking sides,
Jesus does an unexpected dance
between the two great rabbis.

Here is the basic argument about divorce
that forms the context in which Jesus is asked the question. (And by the way, his answer on divorce,
is an example of how Jesus moves through polarities
rather than hanging out on any single pole).

Hillel and Shammai
argued about how the law on divorce,
in the Book of Deuteronomy,
should be interpreted.

Every argument at the time
hinged on that Deuteronomic law.

Deuteronomy grants permission for divorce
but only if a clear and specific regulation is followed.
Divorce was allowed for the man, not the woman.
But a man could not simply abandon his wife;
he had to follow a procedure called, “the bill of divorce”.
It was intended, in Deuteronomy,
as progressive for its time –
insuring more humane treatment of women and children
than the previous practice,
which was to simply abandon a wife
that was no longer wanted.

We need to remember that in Jesus’ day,
polygamy was still allowed,
and so this argument
was never about multiple marriages.
In fact, it is interesting to contemplate what adultery
might mean in a polygamous society,
rather than in one based upon the premise of monogamy.
But I’m not going to go there today.

So Hillel argued
that almost anything
could be a legitimate grounds for divorce –
bad cooking as much as infidelity.

Shammai said, no,
only infidelity is a legitimate ground for divorce.

It is in that context,
between those two positions, someone asks,
“Hey Jesus, what do you think?”

Jesus takes an abrupt and stunning turn
away from Deuteronomy,
and instead roots his argument
in another scripture altogether:
The Book of Genesis.

Jesus says, “remember how God created us male and female,
and how we were joined together (quoting from Genesis)?
Well, what God has joined together
no one can separate.”
Jesus is pointing to the human reality
of painful separation, loss, and abandonment
rather than to some fine point in the law.

From what I have been told
by those who have been through divorce,
it is in fact, more amputation than separation.

Even though the person we were enjoined with
is no longer present,
and even though a piece of paper
says we are no longer joined,
the phantom pain and memory
of a lost limb is still there.
After divorce,
so I have been told,
a piece of us is gone,
just as if a spouse had died.

For one thing,
most people get married with hopes and dreams
about the future.
The loss of hopes and dreams is a grief all of its own.

Even when the divorce is a long time in coming,
and there is no ambivalence
about it being the right and necessary thing to do,
the memories can be like
the phantom sense of a severed limb – still there,
and always a piece of us.
As therapists and counselors can attest,
no one who has been divorced,
or in any kind of profoundly intimate relationship,
ever goes into the next relationship
without bringing their former spouse or partners
right along with them.
That is just a fact of life for us,
just like we bring our mom and dad and sisters and brothers
into our relationships with us as well.

So Jesus does not make a case against the legality of divorce.
The legality of divorce
was never a question in Jesus’ day.

Nor for that matter, was the legality of polygamy.
Jesus does not say that divorce should be illegal,
which is what he would have said
if he were making that case.
Instead, he simply says,
that those who were once joined together by God
no one and nothing
can unjoin.
And we know, from our own experiences, that is very true.

So you see, the question about divorce
is not whether it is legal or not.
The question about divorce
has to do with the personal,
spiritual, and psychological truth
that people who have been joined
at that level of intimacy
are not separated
simply by a legal process or document.
It does everyone involved a disservice to pretend otherwise.

“Whose side are you on, Jesus, Hillel or Shammai?”
Jesus responds: “That’s the wrong question.”

What I imagine Jesus might say to us today,
is that the thing we should be talking about
is not the legality of divorce,
that is a given.
Rather, we should be talking about healing
when and after
a divorce takes place.

Let’s not jabberjaw with legalistic arguments, Jesus might say,
when there is real hurt and pain to deal with.

That’s what I imagine the meaning of his argument implied
to those standing around him.

In other words, Jesus might as well have said,
Let’s realize that when people have shared their
love,
dreams,
home,
their bodies,
and children,
no law will heal the amputation.
So stop with the silly either/or arguments already,
and let’s focus on how to nurture healing.

It seems to me that is what Jesus
was saying with his Genesis rebuttal
to the Deuteronomy argument.

But now, let’s go back to Mary Oliver
and where we began:
We do not have to be good.

In fact, we do not always recognize
what is good
over what is bad, or even evil.
There are many times in our lives,
both personally and historically,
that we do not have enough information
in the moment of decision,
to know whether we are making
a “good” or “bad” decision.
Does that make us “bad” if we choose poorly –
I don’t think so.

The truth is,
if our eyes are open
and our minds receptive,
we understand that qualifiers
such as good and bad,
moral and immoral,
true and false…
are almost always gradations or continuums,
rather than stationary positions
that never move
and are always the same.

My life has not been very long compared so some of you,
but I cannot remember a time since the 1960’s
when we had such a wide-spread,
social mental illness
as we do right now.

It is not just ‘out there’ in the world either,
but right here in this congregation –
around us,
and among us,
and within us.

I am of course referring to the categorization,
the bitter bifurcation, and alienation,
between Trump and Not-Trump;
between left, right, and center;
between black lives matter and all lives matter;
and every other categorical separation
we have, and are creating.

This polarization makes the world,
and our every action and thought a categorical polemic
between black and white,
right and wrong,
straight and crooked,
good and bad.
There is no in-between,
no gradation,
no gray,
no ambiguity,
no situational particularity.

It is a common adolescent worldview
in the literature of human development theory.
Except, when we are fully grown adults
and adolescent thinking is still raging in our minds,
it becomes more of a mental illness.

When adults try to live in a thoroughly polarized world,
it creates the same whirlwind,
rollercoaster ride of emotion
that is characteristic of a teenager.

I would go so far as to suggest
such categorical, polarized thinking
contributes to all manner of social ill
from substance abuse to infidelity,
and from segregation to violence.

In our more sane moments,
we recognize our world
as far more nuanced
than the one characterized by the current
political, theatrical, and news media Rorschach.

We know we live on a continuum between the poles,
and rarely, if ever,
do we actually stand on one
or the other extreme.

Our real world,
THE real world,
calls for much more consultation with others
than pole-sitting at the extremes allow us.

True community,
true spiritual community,
includes sharing our hearts and minds
with one another,
and with sages and professionals,
both ancient and contemporary,
who offer guidance for better ways of living.

We do not have to be good
because we cannot be good
in any absolute sense.
Being “good” in absolute terms
is not one of our choices.

We get to be
good AND bad,
lucky AND sad,
right AND wrong,
up AND down,
in AND out,
and bounced on bumps all along those continuums
like a stagecoach on a dirt road.

That is where we live…all the time.

And in order to live there
with a modicum of happiness and joy,
we have to be able to
“…let the soft animal of our body love what it loves.”
We …do not have to walk on our knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

Instead, we have to listen
for …the world (to) offer itself to our imagination,
call(ing) to (us) like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing our place
in the family of things.

What I hope we hear in all of this
is that we are not supposed to live in a straightjacket
between absolute right and absolute wrong,
but within the world
and the life
that is ours to live.
It is a world in which the wild geese
call our name
and announce our place
in the midst of a living world,
rather than a brutally idealized world
of false categories.

Sometimes, and this is one of those times,
the task of the preacher
is not to proclaim the Scripture
but to hammer it to see what’s in there.
The poles are fire and ice
and we need to move away from them, not toward them.

We do not have to be good,
because that is not one of our choices.

Now when you go home and someone asks,
“What did that guy preach about this time?”
Please don’t say, “Oh, he said we don’t have to be good.”
Instead, though it’s a little more complicated,
say that he said, we need to live as faithfully as we know how
in whichever moment we are in,
with the choices we are given –
AND, like Jesus,
by creating more choices if possible,
than the ones others have given us.

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Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: Divorce, Jesus, Mary Oliver

24 C 2016: Domesticated Christianity

October 16, 2016 by Cam Miller

Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?

Good morning.

You may not feel this way,
being the folks who are listening more than speaking,
but preaching is a relationship,
especially with a resident preacher
instead of supply clergy.
The more and deeper your knowledge of me
and the broader and more intimate my knowledge of you,
the better the preaching will become.

That is why the first year of preaching
is the most difficult for you and me.
You do not know how to take some of the things I say
and I don’t know how you will hear them;

I don’t know what matters most to you,
and you don’t understand what passions drive me.
So like fine wine,
if we are kind and nurturing of one another,
we will age well together
and the preaching relationship will too.

Allow me then, to share a small memory.
It is an image from my childhood
in Grace Episcopal Church, in Muncie, Indiana.

Grace is a small, dark, Tudor style building.

Very small, not like Trinity Geneva.
The wooden pews, wainscot, beams and accents,
are darker than the wood you see here –
it is almost black.

The whole of Grace Church,
sanctuary and parish house,
could probably fit in this nave and chancel.
Grace Church can probably seat 100 people,
maybe 125 cheek-to-jowl.

All the windows are stained glass
like the blue one up yonder;
only they are not massive, panoramic windows.

Instead, the windows of Grace Church are smaller,
more narrow,
and more intense.
Composed of smaller pieces
of ruby, cobalt, and autumn gold
their colors seem even more intense against
its darker interior
than in this great and airy space here.

Like many old Episcopal Church buildings,
Grace smelled musty, like old books.
Filled with decades of old 1928 prayer books,
it wasn’t unusual to sneeze as you opened them.
The people of Grace Church,
as I remember them anyway,
were as constant and predictable
as the droning cadence of the way priests used to recite Morning Prayer.

When I was five or six
I would slouch down in the pew
and engage my imagination
in elaborate pretend scenarios
to keep from going absolutely bonkers with boredom.
Sometimes, for example,
I was a spy hidden in the pew on a dangerous reconnaissance mission
and collecting information on the adults around me.

Certain families always sat in certain places,
just like some of you.
Particular families always sat up front on the left –
not in the very first or second pew,
but one or two removed.
They wore mink and long dark cashmere coats
with very clean shoes that shined
(the way mine were supposed to, my mom would scold).

Behind them were the professors and their families,
in coats and ties and dresses
but somehow not quite as crisp as the up front families.

My family sat in the middle on the right,
which provided an unobstructed view
of the front left section.
The minister’s family sat in the very front row,
his children in a stair-step formation
from oldest to youngest.
As you might imagine they were the most entertaining
because there was always veiled shoving and hitting going on.

This was the late Eisenhower/early Kennedy era,
a scene from a Norman Rockwell painting –
the perfect image of domesticated Christianity.

For some people, that is still the standard
to which Church should aspire to return –
1950’s and early 1960’s Church.
It was before the strife
of the Civil Rights and Anti-war movements
that drove asunder the establishment church.
It was the very picture of domesticated Christianity
that had happily taken its place as a pillar of the culture
through which assimilation and socialization took place.

Even so, and still,
there was a strained tendon of tension
pulsating the heat of a potential fire
underneath the veneer of proper order,
class, and segregation.
I was a witness to it,
and perhaps you were too.
It was Jesus.

Even a bored, restless five-year old boy
could feel the heat of Jesus.
It was only a feeling;
I could never have named it back then.
It was a wordless intuition generated
by the distance between
what our hero-prophet said,
as expressed through those odd
Elizabethan words each week,
and the crisp, clean, and well-mannered adults
sitting properly and noticeably inattentive
as the Gospel was read.

If there was a nasty, bulbous-nosed
and agitating widow,
like the one from Jesus’ story
demanding justice from one of those families
up front on the left,
I never saw it.

Granted, I was only five years old
so there were likely all kinds of things going on
in that Church that I never saw or knew anything about.
But I did know this much:
the dirty,
smelly,
illiterate peasant named Jesus,
who railed and rattled and aroused
was replaced
by a well-mannered,
aromatic
and serenely gentle young man…
a guy that any parent would have been happy
to have date their daughter,
(same sex dating was not mentioned in those days)

Even though the prince-and-pauper switch
of one Jesus for another,
was done completely and thoroughly
through art, music, language, and Sunday School lessons,
their mistake
was in continuing to read the Gospel stories.
Even though the King James’ version of the Bible,
which took the first century
Greek equivalent of pigeon English
and smoothed out its sharp edges and awkward syntax
in order for it to conform to the sensibilities
of educated European upper classes,
the real Jesus still bled through.

All of which is a warm childhood memory way
of saying that the Christianity we have been handed
is a highly domesticated version
of the rigorous and raucous one
that relentlessly rises up
from the pages of the Gospels
like some smacked-down superhero
returning to do battle with the bad guy.

There has always been a wrestling match
between that radical first century Judean peasant
and the well-educated upper class Euro-American culture
that has often used Christianity
as the sheath for enjoying and preserving
its artistic achievements
like architecture, music, and liturgy.

It is a basic and painful conflict
between the perspectives of Biblical people
who lived on the margins and experienced
powerlessness and violence at the hands of empires,
and imperial Roman and Colonialist European cultures
that read those stories about biblical people
as they raped other indigenous cultures
in the name of Christianity.

The language of worship and theology
that has been practiced in popular Christianity –
whether conservative Evangelical,
traditional Roman Catholic
or Mainline Protestant –
is a kind of domesticated religion.
But pasteurizing religion is nothing new.

Every civilization,
from the Roman Empire to the new China
to Nationalist India,
have engaged in the domestication of their religions
in order to incorporate and support
the values and idols
of culture and nationalism.
The heroes and prophets of the world’s religions,
if they were allowed to roam free through the centuries,
would wreak havoc on the social forces
of order and control.
Jesus, for example,
is highly subversive.
Biblical Christianity is subversive of imperial culture
no matter who the emperor is
or which brand of government runs the show.

Where we would prefer refinement
the Bible is course.
Where we would add gentleness
the Bible is militant.
Where we would use reason
the Bible is outrageous and miraculous.
Where we would prefer a high-toned culture
the Bible speaks in vernacular.

The heat of that tension
boils just below the surface
of everything we do as “church.”
It would be too much for us
to cut open a large hole
and let the lava pour forth,
but we should always be boring smaller channels
to allow the heat to escape
and remind us
that the façade we have constructed
is just a façade;
and the spiritual wisdom available to us
is always a barely restrained chaos
waiting to be released.

That is the ominous yet promising image
I would like us to have in mind
as we glance at the last promise
of the Baptismal Covenant.

This is the last week
of a five-part series on Christian spiritual practice
as described by the Baptismal Covenant
that is printed on the cover of your worship guide.
In describing Jesus and the Gospel as I just did
we already have a clue to the dangerous opportunity
evoked by the fifth promise:
Will you strive for justice and peace among all people,
and respect the dignity of every human being?

Will we?
Will we be part of a struggle
for a more equitable distribution of resources?
Will we?

Food,
health care,
housing,
education,
and employment –
will we be part of a struggle
to change the way we do things in this country and around the world
so that these basic resources are more equitably shared?

You see, there is a subversive tension in that promise
because it may go against our own self-interest
and it may interfere
with our political and economic values.

Will we be part of a movement
that struggles for peace?
Will we?

Domestic peace,
so that women and children and men too,
need not fear for their safety
because of abuse.

Gun violence peace,
so that no one need fear being shot
on the street or in their home,
at a concert or movie or school.

Political peace,
so that discourse between factions and candidates
is not violent, abusive, or aimed at stirring up
the darker angels of our natures.

Battlefield peace,
where violent coercion is the principle method
of doing business between nations
or resolving disputes between factions.

Will we practice peace-making?
Will we?

Will we respect the dignity
of every human being?
Will we?
Will we acknowledge our prejudices,
and look at our own bigotries,
and hold up our own hatred
and our suspicions
and our fears
so that we can move through them
on our way to treating everyone with dignity?
Will we?

So we see that this promise of our baptism
is grounded in the Jesus we never really knew,
the one that is undomesticated
and was considered dangerous enough
to be sentenced to death
by means of State terror
because he was subversive to empire.

These promises of our Baptismal Covenant
are a description of what it looks like
to be a partisan of that Jesus.
The Jesus who is a little scary
because he really and truly is a prophet
of the God of Abraham and Sarah.

In conclusion,
for the series as well as for today,
let us note one more thing about the Baptismal Covenant
that is not a promise.
To each question asked,
“Will you…?”
the response is,
“I will…with God’s help.”

“I will,” is the strongest affirmation
in the English language –
both present and future tense.
But “with God’s help”
is also an acknowledgment
that we are incapable by ourselves
to fulfill the promise.
We are insufficient;
we are incapable of fulfilling these promises.
As with anything truly important in our lives,
we are utterly insufficient unto ourselves,
to actually do what we say we intend to do.
We must have God’s help.

I also think that means
God’s help working through the community
not some supernatural zapping
that allows us to overcome
the limitations of our humanity.

“I will with God’s help,”
means that with other people
and in the fabric of spiritual community,
we will find a way to get it done.
We won’t be perfect,
we won’t always make it happen,
we won’t be able to meet
all the demands of each promise.

But with God’s help
in community,
we will.

Our baptism is not about heaven and hell;
we are not saved from anything in our baptism
other than a life of destructive and meaningless
self-orbit.

Instead, our baptism is about being ministers
sent by God
to serve the love of God
in community,
and so create life on earth
as it is in heaven.
That is our mission
should we choose accept it.

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 Trinity Place, An Open Space for Growth, Wellness, Healing, & the Arts

“Open Space” means open and inclusive, welcoming the Geneva and FLX community to use our space, and to partner with us in building an inclusive community for spiritual inquiry and wellness. 

“Growth, Wellness, Healing, & the Arts” means we are pointed toward a particular dimension of life, specifically that which strengthens the relationship of body, mind, and spirit. 

Trinity is a Christian community of worship and spiritual practice welcoming all, and an Episcopal Church in particular. However, we welcome all spiritual traditions and those who have no particular spiritual background but are engaged in a mission consistent with ours. We are looking for partners in mission not members (although we love to welcome new members too).

 

 

 

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